The Demo

[Gandalf Parker]

Thats a great point. The SEV demo lost that "just one more turn" thing for me. Instead it became "where is that older space game". Its hard for me to give the game the decent try-out that Im deterrmined to give it. It deserves at least that.

[NTJedi]

Well Aaron the developer of SE5 did make a very smart move by releasing the demo first. The greatest benefit is all the fans become testers in locating bugs... and some obvious ones have been found. Heaven knows if the gamers here find any major bugs we won't blame Illwinter... we'll blame the beta-testers.
Another benefit of releasing the SE5 demo now is it gives the gaming community a chance to voice their opinion about the changes... allowing Aaron time to add or remove a few extra tweaks/balance/features.

[PhilD]

It all depends on how close SE:V really is to release. If it's an early demo (like a public beta), this means some of the "bad moves" might still be changed. If it's right before gold, it means the game _will_ release 99% as it is in the demo, and apparently the eagerly awaiting fans won't like it until it's significantly patched. Not sure it's so smart a move, in the end.

I'm not an expert on SE, and I'm guessing Dom3 will keep me busy for some time after it releases, so I'm probably going to wait a bit on SE:V to see how the experts are judging it.

We're talking about games that live or die by word of mouth, not huge releases where you see trailers in every computer games store. Hype won't sell this game; happy fans will.